I guess it taught me that karma is worthless. It’s easy to pander and make popular posts but they are usually a pedestrian opinion (did you know that (country) is BAD?) , a variation on a tired joke, or some boring tidbit (the SR-71 fast L O L).

Yea, internet points are pretty useless motivation unless you’re trying to become an influencer—you can see this on HN too.

The one exception are SE sites, where a certain number of fake internet points is required to fully use the site. It's harder to game the system there, though.

Speaking of which, could someone with enough internet points on Math SE ask this guy https://math.stackexchange.com/a/35238 how does he deal with carries during multiplication? I made an account specifically to ask this, but I'm not a mathematician and don't have enough expertise to answer questions asked there (or perhaps I'm too lazy to hunt for questions that I could answer).

You don't have to ask that specific person. Open a new question, point at the answer you linked and ask about the specific bit you want to understand.

Now I feel stupid for not thinking of this obvious solution, thanks!